Video advertisement has become a major part of today's television experience. Video ads are inserted in the designated time slots during live broadcast, captured and reproduced with video recorders along with the content video, inserted into video-on-demand playout, and into the playback of the recorded videos, as well as being used in other applications.
All these applications create a substantial advertisement market with high demand across the advertising landscape, and as such require mature technologies. Several technologies have emerged to support the above-discussed applications and to address the market needs. These technologies are targeted at supporting a very limited number of applications. Currently available technologies are not capable of supporting many or all possible applications simultaneously. Furthermore, each existing technology of inserting video advertisements into a content video is differently evolved to support custom or standard compliant advertisement management systems, analytics systems, targeted advertisement, video resolution and other aspects.
The present invention is aimed at unifying the insertion of the video advertisement into the content video by engaging various techniques including (but not limited to): abstracting from a specific advertisement management system, be it custom or standard; supporting video advertisement insertion into a wide variety of content videos including live broadcast, recorded videos (DVR (Digital Video Recorder), PVR (Personal Video Recorder), Network DVR), video on demand (VOD), pay per view (PPV), and over the top (OTT); abstracting from currently known methods of delivery of the content video and thus creating a plug-in based approach of supporting future methods of delivery of content video; supporting granular targeted delivery of the inserted video advertisements; and supporting targeting device groups of any size including individual targeting.